Qualcomm Tech Summit, Day 2 Live Blog (Starts at 2pm ET)

01:43PM EST – Here we are on day two of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit, and today is going to be all about Snapdragon 855, the next generation smartphone SoC expected to power a large number of flagship devices in 2019. Follow our live blog for all the details. It starts at 9am HST, 2pm ET, 7pm UTC.

04:39PM EST – Q ) Tensor is part of DSP rather than discrete NPU – why? A) Positioned as part of the hexagon family, but it’s a dedicated core.

04:39PM EST – Q) Justification for the Prime Core – even though the clock speeds are perf are lower than S845, there’s still a perf increase. A: Perf increase is mostly IPC. Prime core is a balance between pwoer and efficiency

04:40PM EST – Q) What’s next for computational photography? A) Trend is more cameras and more resolution. Handle cameras and depth cameras. Hardware is coming to support Time-of-flight. Our platform is scalable.

04:42PM EST – Q) Can the Tensor Core work on different data to the vector cores simultaneously? A) Yes

04:42PM EST – Q) Is the Prime core on a seperate power plane to the Performance cores? A) No – different frequency, same power plane.

04:45PM EST – Q) 5G of X50+S855 – standalone modems? A) Yes we have interests. No announcements today. X50 is the first member of a family. Some of which will be Standalone. Qualcomm will be ready.

04:52PM EST – Q) As an OEM, I have the option to not have the X50. If I do choose the X50, what’s the impact on power. A) Remember 4G is better today than the launch of 4G. With simultaneous 4G and 5G, there are large number of ways that data are processed, depends on the mode operation. Can separate contorl traffic and data traffic. Expect power consumption will be tested as we head to commercialisation. But the starting point with 5G is better than 4G.

04:53PM EST – Q) How is the ISP being formed as we move to more cameras? A) Future devices will support more and more concurrent. There’s a different between connectivity and concurrency. No ISP can support 3+ cameras at once, and tricks are used to support more than 3. But hardware is coming.

04:56PM EST – Q) With the CPU cores, can they powered up indivudally? Yes

05:01PM EST – Q) QC said that phones will have multiple front ends, how is power managed? A) Not really multiple front ends. Just multiple antennas. In the end all these radios, they all go through the same sub-systems. Some parts might be powered down if they’re not needed for particular radios, but everything is optimized for power. We offer a turnkey solution.